PA U L S M I T H
EXPLORING REALITY
F E A T U R E D
T O P I C
Cultural Studies Critical Thinking &
The process whereby culture inflects the material world is actually the same process as that by which the material world shapes culture and our experience
WE SEEM TO BE LIVING in a moment in the United States when there’s some profit to be had from casting cultural beliefs, values, and knowledges into strictly oppositional frames. So, even though I believe we are all right now suffering from some dire consequences of that habit, let me begin, almost in mimicry, to address the issue of cultural analysis by way of a kind of Manichean scenario. On the one hand, there are some people out there who still believe that we can have access to some fundamental and obvious reality, an empirical natural world that is theoretically open to our unmediated knowledge if only we persevere long enough. But, they believe, the essential clarity of such a reality is then muddied and confused by all the things that we humans do, socially and culturally. For some of them, the core reality even includes a “human nature,” too, one that would shine through all the varieties and differences wrought by human cultures, upbringings, histories. On the other hand, there are some others who think that those who cling to the first view of the world are just about as quaint as flatearthers. These others—and I’d have to admit I’m a sympathiser—would claim that to think that way is, paradoxically, unrealistic. On the contrary, knowledge of our reality, or of the material world in which we live, is not ever separable from, but indeed is absolutely dependent upon, the cultures we make and have made. This opposition between two ways of conceiving of the world in which we live is an old one, obviously—perhaps even older than the putative clash of Christian and Islamic civilizations that we’re currently hearing a lot about. But it’s one that we appear to be stuck with when we try to PAUL SMITH is professor of cultural studies at
George Mason University. 26
LIBERAL EDUCATION SUMMER 2004
talk about culture and cultural analysis in the modern American university. And, by and large, it seems that one side currently has all the cards. The predominant ideology of universities and university disciplines in our day tends to reflect the first position and rewards its faith in the perfectibility of our knowledge of some objective reality. Other ways of exploring reality and our knowledge of reality often get lost in the shuffle—especially when it comes to handing out whatever benefits and rewards the university has to offer. Cultural analysis
And yet, the other side never quite goes away. Indeed, I’d say that its alternative ways of exploring reality and knowledge have actually made some headway in the last little while. Cultural analysis is, in fact, beginning to provide innovative and satisfying ways of thinking through the complex interrelations of culture and what I prefer to call the material (rather than the natural) world. The new ways of exploring reality that cultural analysis constitutes indeed begin by taking seriously precisely the complexity of forces and processes for which culture is, so to speak, the clearing house. The simplest way of summarizing what cultural analysis assumes is to say that the process whereby culture inflects the material world is actually the same process as that by which the material world shapes culture and our experience. The two processes are indissoluble to the point that they are the same process. In that regard, I have to disagree somewhat with Peter Stearns’s suggestion in his lead article that the core of cultural analysis is going to be found in the concept of causation—how does culture affect or effect, produce or modulate experience and knowledge, etc. I’d argue that a linear, one-way concept of causation doesn’t have much to say to cultural analysis at this point. Or rather, it’s no longer the predominant or most